The Kingdom by the Sea (45 page)

***

In Whitby, on its pair of steep cliffs, there was a sign saying vacancies in every guest house and every hotel. And yet the Horswills, Rose and Sid, were reluctant to give me a room in their hotel.

"My daughter said, 'If a single man comes for a room, don't let him in, Mum,'" Mrs. Horswill said nervously, still holding the door against me.

Mr. Horswill said, "There's this killer," and stared at my commando rucksack.

"You won't have any trouble finding a room in Whitby," Mrs. Horswill said. "Ordinarily, we'd be glad to put you up. It's just that—"

"I'm an American," I said.

"Come in," Mr. Horswill said, and forced the door out of his wife's hand. "We had Americans here in the war. They used to give us gum, lumps of steak, chops—they handed them out the window of their barracks. We went by and took them. Cigarettes—Lucky Strikes and that."

I asked him what the Americans had been doing in Whitby.

"Towing targets over the sea," Mrs. Horswill said, "and shooting at them from the cliffs."

Soon we were having cups of tea and reminiscing about the war and watching the news. The hunt for the Mad Killer was still on. "
Police wish to interview Barry Prudom. They think he may be able to assist them with their enquiries.
"

"Wish to interview!" I said.

"Wish to kick in the goolies," Mr. Horswill said, and winked.

Mrs. Horswill said, "I hope he's not cummin garound to see us."

That was how she talked, slowly and methodically fracturing her words. "If you nee dennythink, just say so," she said, and "Toffees—do you wan tenny?" She said she cooked "everthin gone that menu" and that Sid helped with "the washin gup." She said I could settle my bill on the "morny gov departure" and that I could take my room key with me if I was "goin gout."

I was the only guest in their twenty-room hotel. "A lot of people left yesterday," Mr. Horswill said. "If it's not the strike, it's the killer. They were getting nervy." But I peeked into the register. Only one couple had been there in the past five days, the Hallwarks from Darlington. So Sid was just trying to put up a good front.
Things will pick up next month,
these hotel people always said. But it did not seem likely, and it could be creepy, having a meal alone in a dining room with nineteen empty tables. It was like Lahore at Ramadhan.

The Horswills had given me the smallest room in the place. I had asked for a single. This was a literal-minded country and not given to the expansive gesture. I was three flights up, in the back, one of the few five-pounders, and every other room was empty.

The weather turned bad on my second day. Whitby people claimed that the weather was always much worse north of here—in Newcastle and Berwick. Mrs. Horswill told me how, a month ago, a woman had been walking along the breakwater extension ot the harbor, and a gale sprang up and swept the woman into the sea.

"They spen tevver so much time looking for her, and when they found her, she were naked. The sea were so rough, it strip toff all her clothes."

Mrs. Horswill was a little morbid on this subject. She kept track' of the Whitby lifeboat, its comings and goings, its rescues and disasters, how many saved, how many drowned, and whether they were British. She sat at the window of her hotel on the cliff, always watching and usually knitting.

"Lifeboat's goin gout," she said.

It returned empty, she reported.

"Lifeboat's goin gout again," she said an hour later, and in the same breath, "'A Tribute to Frank Sinatra,'" and smiled at the television screen.

They loved him in England, the older folk. In places like Uggle barnby they knew all the words to "Chicago." American crooners were very popular: Bing Crosby, Perry Como, and singers I had never heard of, and of the most obscure they would say, "Of course his grandmother was English." And dancers—Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers; and figure skaters—they knew the names of the American ones ("Bert and Betty Woofter—ever so graceful—they won a gold at Husqvarna"). And corny American musicals, and "Dallas," and Dixieland jazz; and in the depths of the English countryside country and western music was popular, the farm laborers had side-burns, and sometimes one saw—as I did in Whitby—a man of forty with a tattoo on his arm reading
Elvis the King—R.I.P.

The day before I left Whitby I was sitting on a bench, staring in the direction of the beautiful ruined abbey, and a woman of about fifty, with a bow-legged dog, sat down and we started talking. Her name was Mrs. Lettsom and she had a boardinghouse in Whitby, but her real ambition was to move to Sandsend, a mile up the coast.

"The houses there are smashing," Mrs. Lettsom said. "They say the people are posh," she added sadly, "but I don't mind."

A three-bedroom house in Whitby cost about £22,000, and in Sandsend £34,000.

"But it's a dream," Mrs. Lettsom said. "I'll never have that kind of money." She was looking in the direction of Sandsend. Then she turned to me and said, "So what do you think about this bloke, going around killing people?"

***

I decided to walk to Scarborough, about twenty miles down the coast, on a footpath called the Cleveland Way. I slipped out of Horswill Heights, crossed the harbor, and climbed the stairs up East Cliff, where in
Dracula
Lucy Westenra ("I was waked by a flapping at the window") went sleep-walking and got the horrors. Now instead of a vampire there was a tent and caravan site there at Salt-wick Nab. It was not messy, but it was very ugly, and it occurred to me that such places were reduplications in canvas and tin of the neighborhoods the people had left, little canvas Smethwicks and tin Pudseys jammed together, with a pub, a shop, and a video shed in the center.

The coast was littered with black wrecks and stoved-in hulks, and this path had cracks in it—parts of it had already fallen into the sea, a hundred feet down.

There was a young woman ahead of me, walking alone but moving briskly. When I came abreast of her she asked me the time, and I took this to mean that she would not mind talking to me. Her name was Hazel, she was thirty, and she was walking to Robin Hood's Bay just for the hell of it. She had red cheeks and freckles; she was a jogger; her husband was in a fishing competition in Whitby. She was not interested in fishing (I never saw a woman in Britain holding either a fishing rod or a cricket bat). She had been married for two months.

"I live a strange life," she said.

I was delighted to hear this, but when she explained, it did not seem so strange. Both she and her husband worked at night, eight-thirty in the evening until six-thirty in the morning, four ten-hour days and then a long weekend, Friday to Sunday. Henry worked in maintenance, and she was a cook in the staff cafeteria—head cook, actually—and she had been doing the job for six years.

The workers who ate in the cafeteria had a very tough union. Once they had threatened a strike over the food.

"I decided that we were wasting too much food," Hazel said. "So I changed the menu—two main dishes and two sweets. The men moaned, 'We'll go out on strike'—all that lark. The shop steward came to me and insisted that the night workers get the same four main dishes and four sweets—two hot sweets and two cold—that the day workers got. So that's what we have now, four main dishes, because the union says so. And we're back to wasting food. If one of the choices runs out, they abuse me. They get a full breakfast, too. They're well looked after. It's an American company."

Did she like working for an American company?

"In some ways they're just like the English," she said. "The management give themselves big fancy cars as perks. They don't need the cars for their work. They travel to work in them, same as we do. It makes me mad."

She cooked for seventy men. Cooking for two people was easy. She didn't understand people who complained about it. But she wished she got outside more. She wanted to do more running, perhaps run a fast marathon—she could do four hours and ten minutes, but that wasn't good enough. Henry always wanted to play Scrabble, but they had terrible rows when they played.

"This is what I like," she said, as we rounded the bluff called North Cheek. "This is fun."

But the cliffs were falling into the sea, and in places there were big bites out of the path and a detour through a wheatfield or under a fence. On certain stretches, I thought: This path won't be here next year.

Hazel was silent for a while, and then she said, "I wonder what's going to happen."

What was she talking about?

She said, "I read somewhere that they're closing down whole towns in Canada."

At Robin Hood's Bay ("a quaint irregular fishing village on a steep slope") I bought Hazel a drink and then set off alone along the bushy cliffs and lumpy green headlands. At Ravenscar there were shrieking schoolchildren. One said, "They just shot that bloke!" I knew exactly who the dead man was. Sometimes it was not like a country at all, but rather a small parish.

H
IKING SOUTH
on the teetering coastal path toward Scarborough, I took a wrong turn and stumbled onto a gravelly lane. It led in a wide straight way through the woods. It was so impressively useless a thoroughfare, I looked for it on my map. This sort of landscape feature was sometimes labeled
Roman road (course of),
and indicated by a broken line. But just as often it was identified as
Disused Railway Line,
and seemed just as ancient and just as derelict as a Roman road.

This thing had been part of the North-Eastern Railway, between Whitby and Scarborough. "The line skirts the coast, affording views of the sea to the right," the old guidebooks had said. But now there were only two alternatives: the footpath that was falling into the sea, and Route A-171, a dangerous speedway of dinky cars and whining motorbikes. And the railway had been turned into a bridle path—a degenerate step, since the railway had itself replaced the mounted traveler, the coach and four, and the horse bus.

The railway had not been profitable, only useful. And now, after a century's interruption of technology, horses had repossessed the route. I had seen this all over Britain—defunct viaducts, abandoned cuttings, former railway stations, ruined railway bridges—and I thought of all the lost hopes and all the wasted effort. Then, small dismantled England seemed simple and underdeveloped—and too mean to save herself—deceived by her own frugality.

I continued down the Disused Railway Line, marveling at the stupidity of it. They started by closing stations; then they cut the number of trains; then, with few trains and a reduced service, they could prove the line was losing money and not worth keeping; and then the line was closed for good and the tracks sold as scrap iron. And then it belonged to Ramblers and hackers; it was where people took their dogs to shit.

It was like a ghastly parody of hard times. In what had been the greatest railway country in the world, and the easiest and cheapest to traverse, the traveler was now told with perfect seriousness, "You can't get there from here."

This was a wonderful thing for my circular tour, because parts of Britain that had been frequented by travelers for hundreds of years had now become inaccessible, and what had been villages well served by railway lines had become curiously anorexic-looking and tumble-down, somehow deserving the epitaph from "Ozymandias." I had thought traveling around Britain would be a breeze; without a car it was often very difficult, but it revealed to me long coastal stretches of unexpected decrepitude.

It sometimes looked the reverse, yet it was decrepitude all the same. One such sight—one of the saddest and most irritating for me in Britain—was the railway station that had been auctioned off and sold to an up-and-comer who had turned it into a bijou bungalow. I found these maddening: the superbly solid Victorian railway architecture now the merest forcing house for geraniums and cats—Nigel and Jenny Bankler ("We're planning to start a baby") presently hogging the whole premises that used to be the station building at Applecross. "That was the waiting room, where Jenny has the breakfast nook, and do you see that funny little window thing, where there's that magnificent jar of muesli? Well, years ago, that was the—" Nigel wanted to call it Couplings, because the weekends they used it (their proper house was a semi in Cheadle), Jenny was practically insatiable. In the end they settled for the Sidings. Most of the other stations had become second homes. Foot-plate Cottage and Level Crossing and Dunrailing were right up the line, and one still had its original ticket window and grille (the Nordleys had trained some variegated ivy up it—looked smashing). "We got this place for practically nothing," they always said. "Mind you, we've put a fair bit of money into it," and then—with a jowly little grin—"We've always liked trains. Haven't we, Petal?"

I could not see one of these railway station bungalows and the owner-occupiers without thinking of
Planet of the Apes.
And now that the railway strike had started, I could foresee a time when every railway line would be turned into a cinder track for dog-owners and horse-lovers, and all the stations into bungalows. Thousands of miles of railway had already gone that way—why not the rest of it? Many of these lines had been closed by the Beeching Report of 1963. While I was traveling around the coast in the spring and summer of 1982, a new report on British Railways was being written. This was the Serpell Report, offering several options. Option A, greatly favored by the powerful road lobby, slashed the railway network from eleven thousand to sixteen hundred miles, leaving a skeleton service on the rails, and created a traffic jam on the roads that extended from John O'Groats to Land's End.

This trackless railway line took me into Scarborough.

***

Scarborough was the most complete seaside resort I had seen so far in Britain. It was a big full-blooded place, three hundred feet up on a part of the coast that was a geological freak. A buckling during the Jurassic period had given Scarborough a Front like a human face—two bays like eye sockets and the bluff between like a great nose of oolite. (It was a fact that people tended to settle those parts of the coast that had huge and recognizably human features—and the settlers even gave those features anatomical names.) Scarborough had theaters and concert halls and department stores; its ledges and steeps were lined with boardinghouses. The town had the same ample contours as its landladies, and the same sense of life in which even platitudes were delivered with gusto. "The biggest fool to a workingman these days is hisself!" The butchers wore straw boaters and blood-stained smocks, and among their sausages and black puddings were braces of pigeons still wearing feathers. On a coast in which one place was turned into a holiday camp and another was declared bankrupt and a third was sliding into the sea, Scarborough seemed, if not eternal, at least busy, prosperous, and alive.